The Last Nude

September 26, 2011
In Avery’s second novel (after The Teahouse Fire), poor young Rafaela meets Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka in 1920s Paris. Rafaela is no stranger to the currency of sex (“I had traded sex for a train ticket, for an apartment, for a coat and hat and shoes, and most recently... for money”). Before meeting de Lempicka, however, Rafaela had never gone to bed because she wanted to, and the artist awakens the young woman’s desire. Centered around de Lempicka’s provocative nudes of Rafaela, the novel chronicles the shifting boundaries between artist and muse over the course of a heated affair. The relationship is tested when the prestigious Salon d’Automne jury accepts two of de Lempicka’s Rafaela paintings, The Dream and La Bella Rafaela. De Lempicka receives an offer for the latter work before the exhibit even opens, and Rafaela’s portrait becomes a sensation, leaving her uncertain of what to expect in the wake of success, especially from her lover. Though at times contrived, the strength of Avery’s novel lies in her depiction of a driven and accomplished artist and an impressionable waif who finds that her beauty no longer belongs to her.

November 1, 2011
Avery (The Teahouse Fire, 2006, etc.) is right in step with the current publishing trend toward romantic yet literary historical fiction with this imagined romance between the cubist/art deco artist Tamara de Lempicka and the model Rafaela, who appears in six of her paintings. The first, longer section of the novel is told from half-Italian-American Catholic/half-Jewish Rafaela Fano's viewpoint and set among the sexually fluid ex-pats of Paris in 1927. On her way from the Bronx to an arranged marriage in Italy at age 17, Rafaela runs away to Paris, where she quickly becomes part of the demimonde. Rafaela meets 27-year-old Tamara de Lempicka in the Bois de Boulogne (a factual encounter), and Tamara takes her home to pose. Already an established painter, Tamara is an aristocratic émigré from Poland by way of Russia and the mother of a young daughter. She is also going through a difficult divorce and has had affairs with men and women. Soon Tamara and Rafaela are lovers. Rafaela has been paid for sex by numerous men, but for the first time she falls in love. What Tamara feels is less clear because she lives within a self-invented, larger-than-life persona. She is a serious artist and her sexual passion for Rafaela seems real, but so is her passion for money. Soon she embroils Rafaela in a scheme that pits two wealthy art buyers in a competition over who gets the second version of her painting "Beautiful Rafaela," a painting she promises Rafaela she will never sell. The novel's shorter second section shifts to 1980 Mexico, where the aged Tamara spends her last days. Steeped in largely feminine/lesbian sensuality and peopled by famous and cultural figures of pre–World War II Europe, the novel is a dark, sexy romp, although it ends in a disappointing whimper.

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August 1, 2011

An American in 1927 Paris, Rafaela Fano is so desperate that she's about to stoop to prostitution when she meets Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, for whom she agrees to serve as model. Rafaela soon becomes the lover of the ravishing and ravenous de Lempicka, a Polish aristocrat dispossessed by the Russian Revolution. De Lempicka's images of Rafaela come to embody the entire spirit of the new age--until the market crashes and clouds of war start to gather. Two things make this book especially promising: it's based on authentic and obviously engrossing truth, and it's written by the author of the beautiful The Teahouse Fire.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2011
Those eyes! Those lips! That hair! Tamara de Lempicka's iconic Jazz Age paintings that immortalize Rafaela Fano in her nude glory (especially The Dream and La Belle Rafaela) now see glittering, luminescent life in Avery's novel, a riveting lesbian love story of heart-stopping passion, rapture, and stunning duplicity. In 1920s Paris, Tamara, her world lost to WWI, is painting for anyone who'd lost a world, too . . . making our heaven myself, stroke by stroke. Avery (The Teahouse Fire, 2007) places lovers Tamara and Rafaela within a richly portrayed circle of cultural touchstones, including Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, the American expat who published James Joyce's Ulysses and founded Shakespeare & Co., a bookstore-haven for artistic souls. Against that brightly pigmented background, this artist-model lovers' tale is as subtle and seductive as the silk Rafaela listens to with her hands as she designs a slip for her beloved, as stirring as Rafaela (whose survival depends on her beauty), radiant after her first sex for pleasure, seeing Paris, a rose-windowed city, and thinking, This always. Just this. Avery's breathtaking shimmer of first love and its aftermath will turn heads.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)